Join WEAC to bring teacher voice to proposed license changes

January 5, 2018

The Department of Public Instruction is proposing major changes to teacher licensing in Wisconsin, and those changes include teacher discipline and teacher rights. You can learn more about these changes – and how you can take action to influence them – during a WEAC Tele-Town Hall phone call on Monday, January 15. We will be calling all active-teacher members for whom we have a personal phone number, so you don’t need to do anything, just listen for a call from WEAC President Ron Martin at 6:30 p.m. Monday, January 15.

If you are a WEAC member and are not sure whether we have your current home or cell phone number, please fill out this form to provide your number and express your interest in getting more information about the proposed changes to teacher licensing. You can also use this form to express your opinion about the proposed changes.

Here is some background on the Teacher Rights Proposals:

The DPI has proposed a series of sweeping changes that directly impact teacher rights associated with potential disciplinary action which do nothing to attract or keep teachers in the profession and undermine the concept of a team of educators working for student success. Along with creating a very broad category called boundary violations as aggravating factors that could cause a license to be revoked, the overhaul rewards teachers for becoming informants against other teachers, allows the DPI to suspend teachers with limited proof and creates categories of offenses in which the DPI may revoke a license, and when it must. Instead of felonies being the reason a license is revoked, there are new vague offenses, such as revocation for a teacher who engages in more than one boundary violation – which covers a wide scope of arbitrary judgments, like showing favoritism.